Culture Quotes

But cheating has always been the purview of fairies, and as we are about to enter their domain, we ought to act in accordance with local customs.

~ Catherynne M. Valente

It's a civic virtue to be exposed to things that appear to be outside your interest. In a complex world, almost everything affects you – that closes the loop on pecuniary self-interest. Customers are always right, but people aren't.

~ Clive Thompson

The farm work they hated was the only work they knew. Often, even the basic skills of plumbing or electricity or mechanical work were mysteries to them – as were the job discipline and the subtleties that children raised in the industrial world learn without thinking about them; starting work on time, working set hours, taking orders from strangers instead of their father, playing office politics.

~ Robert A. Caro

By acquiescing in an act that causes such suffering to a living creature, who among us is not diminished?

~ Rachel Carson

Civilization is in fact the longest story of all. Civilization can persist through a series of economies.

~ Fernand Braudel

After 1968 the restored communist regime required all Czech rock musicians to sit a written exam in Marxism Leninism

~ Niall Ferguson

In India we're fighting to retain a wilderness that we have. Whereas in the west, it's gone. Every person that's walking down the street is a walking bar code. You can tell where their clothes are from, how much they cost, which designer made which shoe, which shop you bought each item from. Everything is civilized and tagged and valued and numbered and put in it's place. Whereas in India, the wilderness still exists-the unindoctrinated wilderness of the mind, full of untold secrets and wild imaginings.

~ Arundhati Roy

One problem with today's culture is that we defend too many rights and ignore too many wrongs.

~ Ron Brackin

She came from the most worthless of classes - the rich, with a smattering of culture.

~ Virginia Woolf

What makes a civilization real to its inhabitants, in the end, is not just the splendid edifices at it centre, nor even the smooth functioning of the institutions they house. At its core, a civilization is the texts that are taught in its schools, learned by its students and recollected in times of tribulation.

~ Niall Ferguson

Support what is good and spit out what is bad. Get off of your knees and reject the role of slave to the culture of violence.

~ Bryant Mcgill

Culture, religion, and education, are conspiracies to standardize worldviews.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

The Japanese had no idea what elements of Western culture and institutions where the crucial ones, so they ended up copying everything, from western clothes and hair styles to the European practice of colonizing foreign people. Unfortunately, they took up empire-building at precisely the moment when the cost of imperialism began to exceed the benefits.

~ Niall Ferguson

[C]ulture, for all its importance, is not some miasma that seeps into people through their skin. Culture relies on neural circuitry that accomplishes the feat we call learning. Those circuits do not make us indiscriminate mimics but have to work in surprisingly subtle ways to make the transmission of culture possible. That is why it is not an alternative to a focus on learning, culture and socialization, but rather an attempt to explain how they work.

~ Hafiz

The philosopher cannot seriously put to himself questions that his civilization has not lived.

~ William Barrett

Preserving cultural diversity is considered a supreme virtue today, but the members of the diverse subcultures don't always see it that way. People have wants and needs, and when cultures rub shoulders, people in one culture are bound to notice when their neighbors are satisfying those those desires better than they are. When they do notice, history tells us, they shamelessly borrow wherever works best.

~ Hafiz

For the Arab, the past does not merely live. The past defines the present.

~ Davis Bunn

The overall result was drift punctuated by protest.

~ Charles Emmerson

The long-term integrity of the empire would not be assured by warm words alone. Britains own position in the empire had changed. Once, the country been the engine room of empire, the productive heart of the beast. But with Britain becoming more like a boardroom, investing money, taking decisions, but essentially living off the labor of others, and off the earnings of the past? At some point in the future, might even this role wither away, and might Britain become little more than a repository of British tradition, a common idealized land into which Britons abroad – in Australia, Canada, New Zealand or South Africa – could retreat, a collective memory of Greenfields and swooping glens?

~ Charles Emmerson

In a stress pressure-cooker like America, I believe we will see more and more shooting massacres. Violence is in our cultural DNA.

~ Bryant Mcgill

America is the world's top war-master, the most sophisticated killer-culture in history.

~ Bryant Mcgill

The starting point to freedom is to begin questioning the cultural narrative you have been sold.

~ Bryant Mcgill

Before saying anything further about culture, I consider the world is hungry and does not care about culture, and people artificially want to turn these thoughts away from hunger and direct them towards culture.

~ Antonin Artaud

Sometimes you just find a culture that breaks your heart,” she said finally.

~ Lily King

The world of most men is given to them by their culture..

~ Richard Wright

Food is everything we are. It's an extension of nationalist feeling, ethnic feeling, your personal history, your province, your region, your tribe, your grandma. It's inseparable from those from the get-go.

~ Anthony Bourdain

Every old man that dies is a library that burns.

~ Amadou Hampâté Bâ

Jesus was trying to present value of a life of vulnerability in which one would have practical and needed experience of the same. It would be a life without baggage, so one would learn to accept others and their culture instead of always carrying along our own country's assumptions and calling them the Gospel.

~ Richard Rohr

I never learned to say shit before a lady. I don't believe in progress in quite the way you seem to. You believe in it more than Grandmother did. As for those purely cultural patterns of convention you think I ought to escape from, they happen to add up to civilization, and I'd rather be civilized than tribal or uncouth.

~ Wallace Stegner

Everyone reads, everyone hears things discussed. Consequently, if you do not listen to Theology, that will not mean that you have no ideas about God. It will mean that you have a lot of wrong ones--bad, muddled, out-of-date ideas.

~ C.s. Lewis

Nations are as equal as so many madmen or drunkards.

~ Fritz Leiber

a single generation enamoured of foreign ways is almost enough in history to risk the whole continuity of civilization and learning.

~ Sister Nivedita

It's because there are too many people who want to stop us having fun. That's the reason.

~ Alexander Mccall Smith

We live in a culture of complaint because everyone is always looking for things to complain about. It's all tied in with the desire to blame others for misfortunes and to get some form of compensation into the bargain.

~ Alexander Mccall Smith

It seemed perverse to some, but for all their apparent militarism the Gzilt had remained peaceful over many millenia; it was the avowedly peaceful Culture that had , within living memory, taken part in an all-out galactic war against another civilisation.

~ Iain M. Banks

Academic life is but half life it is a withdrawal from the fight to utter smart things that cost you nothing except the thinking them from a cloister.

~ Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

The heathen could only be eliminated as a force if their culture was completely erased.

~ Tariq Ali

The dominating idea of English society was not cultivate virtue but to avoid scandal.

~ Edward Short

She'd asked him what it was like to be in there, doing nothing but then being woken up to speak to somebody you couldn't see. He'd said that it was like being woken from a deep and satisfying sleep, to be asked questions while you kept your eyes closed. He was quite happy. Sight was over-rated anyway.

~ Iain M. Banks

Two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time. We've never quite made peace with that in the theater---set designer Robin Wagner

~ Barbara Isenberg